Have you ever wanted to be an astronaut? To see the far reaches of our galaxy and beyond? But you never got your PhD in astro physics or engineering? I hear ya. I’m still waiting for the interstellar JetBlue to start selling tickets. But until then, we can dream of distant nebula, quasars, black holes and red giants. But what if I told you that trip can be taken today, in your 1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee? Find out how…Ok so I didn’t really go to the stars. And alot of that hype I just spat was a cheap trick to lure you into reading the rest of this post. I was walking home from a friend’s birthday party on Saturday night. I looked up and the image above was the first thing I saw. Not in the sky, but in a seemingly unusable photo that was severely underexposed and almost deleted.
Every once in a while, I shoot such a crappy photo, that it cannot be salvaged by any means. I will sometimes recycle the photo into something completely new and abstract. The process for creating this photo can be seen below.
In Adobe Lightroom:
1. Imported Image
2. White Balance Adjustment for excessive orange tones
3. Exposure Boosted
4. Converted to Black & White
5. More Exposure Boost
6. Fill Light Boost
7. Brightness Boost
8. Contrast Reduction
9. Clarity Boost
10. Vibrance Reduction
11. Saturation Boost
12. Sharpening Boost
13. Luminance Noise Smoothing
14. Color Noise Reduction
15. Crop 1
16. Crop 2
17. Crop 3
18. Crop 4
19. Crop 5
In Photoshop:
20. Duplicated layer, lowered opacity and applyed slight gausian blur top layer.
21. Color balanced a bit to eliminate some unwanted green tones, boost reds. Applied Liquify filter to make bright node in upper left corner more spherical. Added Space dust
22. Added a little more noise, luminescent space dust. (Final Product)
